Blizza Blizza

The next time I hear someone under the age of 100 talk about how old he or she feels, I’m going to pass on this story. A Chechnyan woman appears to be 124 years old, which would make her not only the world’s oldest living person, but the oldest authenticated human in recorded history.

At 124 years old, Ms. Khachukayeva has outlived the tsars, the Bolsheviks, Communism, the Nazis, and every US President since Grant. She has lived through the invention of the telephone, the audio recording, the bicycle, the colour photograph, the video recording, practical electricity, the automobile, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the rocket, the jet, the electronic computer, and the transistor. She has witnessed the revival of the Olympic Games, the formation of every major professional sports league, two World Wars and countless regional conflicts, the splitting of the atom, the landing of humans on the Moon, the first cloned animals, and the sequencing of the human genome. She was four years old when Krakatoa exploded in 1883, 27 when San Francisco nearly collapsed in the great earthquake of 1906, and 101 when Mt. St. Helens buried the Pacific Northwest in 1980.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.